Society has always attributed a high level of importance to educational achievement. In primitive cultures, education was informal and occurred largely as part of an individual's participation in society. Societal roles evolved over time as people began to specialize in certain trades, such as butchers, tanners, merchants, and carpenters. Training for these roles again occurred through participation—ultimately through organized apprenticeships. In these contexts, learning took place though observing and imitating, and in a public context.
As societies grow more complex and develop much greater knowledge, they also develop a greater need for formal education and a greater ability to spend time acquiring education, rather than on meeting day-to-day needs. Such education typically involves memorizing or analyzing facts and situations that are only indirectly relevant to everyday life, and that may not involve personal experience of an event. For example, in learning history, one may at best approximate a personal experience of an event. Alternatively, in learning mathematics, one generally learns basic operations in the abstract and later progresses to hypothetical examples that employ the concepts.
The natural learning process is one of continual progression, with each level of knowledge building on what was previously learned. One way in which to encourage continual progression in learning is to provide a student with a stretched goal that moves outward as the student comes closer to the goal.
One manner by which abstract ideas or a large group of facts may be learned is through drills, such as repeated questioning on various aspects of a topic of interest. Examples include flash cards. Drilling may be automated using computing devices, such as personal computers or personal digital assistants (PDAs). For example, interactive drilling may be provided with multiple choice, true/false, and short-answer questions. Examples of computer-based drilling systems are Flash!™ and Supermemo™. There is a need for a computer drilling system that stretches a student's abilities to help maximize the amount of information that the student can learn in a given time frame.